oh, where to begin! In my story, The Secret of Thy Glee, she’s Stan’s kid and the one running the Mystery Shack and minding the twins for the summer instead of Stan, who has retired down to Mexico as of the events of the show. This doesn’t stop her from also pursuing her science goals and activities, nor her other… secret… projects. She is #tired.

It’s not posted yet, as I’m wanting to complete at the very least the first half of the story (which, as it’s a two parter, is basically the first story) before I start posting! But I have plans for it from Robin picking the twins up at the bus stop alllll the way to the first night of next summer. It’ll be fun!!

@blazenight-it was a total darling and drew her as an adult for me (see below), and I’m still utterly obsessed. @mathsanddinos has also drawn her, linked here!

Yes! I’ve done a ton of research for those topics! Any time I write about something scientific, I pile as much real science into it as I can. That’s one of my favourite things to do.

The Portal Gun:

First of all, I took inspiration from Rick & Morty. Since I’ve established that tibap/awe takes place in a truly infinite multiverse, it contains all other universes, so it was a fun nod to another show I enjoy. Rick’s portal gun runs on a substance called “concentrated dark matter,” which is nonsense, of course, but I love taking a piece of sci-fi bunk and trying to explain it.

The first thing I had to research was dark matter. Dark matter, simply, is matter that has been theorized to exist in order to explain the formation and behaviour of galaxies. Galaxies formed too early for the amount of observable matter (that is, matter that radiates or reflects light) that we can detect, and there’s too little of it to account for how quickly they can spin without breaking apart. There’s also a more gravitational lensing (light bending due to gravity) than we would expect. Dark matter is meant to explain all those things by producing gravity while being invisible to our current detection methods. We have no idea what it is – it’s basically a placeholder for whatever is actually out there.

Since I wanted to describe concentrated dark matter (henceforth known as CDM) without committing to explanation of what dark matter actually is, I had to get a little creative. How could a substance of any kind fuel wormhole generation? It would need to be powerful, especially since these wormholes would be bridges between universes, not just between spatially separated sections of one universe. (I’ve already gone into a little detail regarding how I think the Gravity Falls universe functions cosmologically (you can find that post here), so I won’t reiterate it now, but it’s interesting stuff!) Essentially, the substance would need to be able to generate negative energy in order to punch a hole between realities.

I decided that, whatever CDM is, it can generate negative energy because most of its mass exists in tiny folded up dimensions, like those required by M-Theory (one of my favourite theories). I wanted the portal gun to be existentially threatening to Earth for… thematic reasons (lol), so I gave it some weirder instabilities like the risk of catastrophic vacuum decay or singularity generation (mini black holes, but stable ones that could actually cause damage). I borrowed the idea of a casimir cavity to house the CDM and harness its effects.

There’s some other science and philosophy I learned about and incorporated, but I’ll keep this spoiler free and not mention those.

The Mindscape:

The research I did to develop my version of the mindscape was more philosophical than scientific. I started with Plato’s Realm of the Forms because I wanted to commit to depicting Bill as a truly 2-dimensional being. That meant he couldn’t be physical in any sense because without the 3rd dimension, there’s absolutely no space of any kind; imagine a piece of paper with a thickness of zero – you know what that is? Nothing! So, I decided that Euclydia existed in a purely mental state, similar to Plato’s Forms. This means that in tibap/awe, Euclydia was just a small part of the larger Mindscape.

From there, I decided that the Mindscape is made up of a sort of fractal lattice of various smaller mindscapes; each individual thinking being has a mindscape of their own, and they’re linked by this higher dimensional structure. Dreamscapes are a subsection of an individual’s mindscape. I came up with these ideas mostly from years spent reading trip reports on Erowid (especially DMT, inhalants, and salvia) and near death experiences on NDERF. I wanted the general cosmology of the multiverse in tibap/awe to be infinitely fractal-like, where each layer of reality resembles other layers in all directions. Technically, the whole multiverse is a mindscape (as seen in The Sand).

So, my version of the Mindscape is inhabited by multidimensional shapes and forms that are an emergent phenomena caused by the minds that make up the multiverse at large. I used tesseracts specifically to represent human minds because I love them, teehee. I read about holism and panpsychism and then remembered I had a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach and reread that to pull concepts (and all of Amy’s dialogue!) from. Isomorphism is a load-bearing idea that I will say no more about. ;) I also read bits and pieces of The Emperor’s New Mind. Dualism is, of course, something I had to look into. I’ve read a lot about the philosophy of self and the philosophy of mind as well. Modal metaphysics has played a big part too, but less to do with the mindscape specifically and more with just for the multiverse in general. String theory factors in too.

There are likely other things I’ve forgotten to include, but those are the big concepts I’ve been working with. I’m always reading this stuff, both for school and for leisure, so I just pick little bits and pieces up everywhere.